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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24529336">Sorting Hat Chats the Podcast (Transcript Archive)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirgewithoutmusic/pseuds/dirgewithoutmusic'>dirgewithoutmusic</a>, <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/improbabledragon/pseuds/improbabledragon'>improbabledragon</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Avatar: The Last Airbender, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, The Witcher (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 09:34:35</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>22,034</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24529336</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirgewithoutmusic/pseuds/dirgewithoutmusic, https://archiveofourown.org/users/improbabledragon/pseuds/improbabledragon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Sorting Hat Chats Sorts things two ways:<br/>Primary Houses are WHY a character does things.<br/>Secondary Houses are HOW a character does things. </p><p>This system and the analysis contained within these transcripts are all about morals &amp; methods-- and the places those two things intersect. It's a way to look at conflict, change, communication, and collusion in fiction and it's a whole lot of fun.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>161</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. What is Sorting Hat Chats? / Sorting The Hunger Games</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This isn't a fic but it's absolutely a fanwork, so I feel justified archiving it here, in this archive of our own. </p><p>Want to see the definitions we're working off of here? Check out sortinghatchats.wordpress.com or sortinghatchats.tumblr.com</p>
    </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Podcast available on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Castos, and other players if you want to listen. </p><p>http://sortinghatchats.castos.com/</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>
    <em>SHC Sorts The Hunger Games - Episode One Transcript</em>
  </b>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily:</b>
  <span> Hi I’m Emily.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> And I’m Kat.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily:</b>
  <span> And we’re Sorting Hat Chats! </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> And today we’re going to introduce our system and also sort The Hunger Games.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>This system is originally based on of course the Harry Potter Hogwarts houses, but we kind of took it and expanded it and created a more expansive and layered personality taxonomy -- which are some fancy words.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>So the purpose of the system-- the reason why the system exists at all-- is because Kat and I wanted to be able to better talk to each other.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>When one of us said, “Oh man that character, they’re very Gryffindor,” we wanted to know exactly what the other person meant. So we’ve spent the past-- is it ten years? The past quite a few years--</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>At least eight.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>At least eight years trying to capture exactly what we meant in a system that we could then use to have conversations. And so that’s what this podcast is going to be about-- it’s going to be us having conversations. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Ultimately what all of these terms are is a glossary. What you do with those words is where it gets really really interesting. I mean defining them was also really interesting, because, you know. But there are a lot of fun ways to apply this system and we’re going to talk about all of it.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>But today, we’re going to talk about The Hunger Games. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yes, we’re going to take this one bite at a time. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>So in this system, we sort people in two ways. They have a Primary House, which is WHY they do things. And they have a Secondary House, which is HOW they do things.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>It’s important to note that your Primary House is not any more your house than your Secondary House. We call it Primary and Secondary because that’s just kinda how we ended up talking about it. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>We’re just a lot more obsessed with </span>
  <em>
    <span>why</span>
  </em>
  <span> than </span>
  <em>
    <span>how</span>
  </em>
  <span>, as people, so we always talked about it first.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>But that doesn’t mean </span>
  <em>
    <span>you</span>
  </em>
  <span> have to be more obsessed with </span>
  <em>
    <span>why</span>
  </em>
  <span> than </span>
  <em>
    <span>how</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Primaries aren’t about what’s good, what’s evil. They’re about how you build your system.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>The shape of your system. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span> And everyone gets moral information from all these sources. It’s about what you prioritize. Gryffindor Primaries prioritize information from their gut, their conscience.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Ravenclaw Primaries focus on the external systems in their lives like religions or codes of ethics.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>They have to look outside themselves. Trusting what's inside themselves over something they’ve thought about or learned or decided on is going to feel really selfish to them. Whereas to a Gryffindor, trusting an outside authority when their gut is telling them something is wrong is going to make them feel dirty. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>But both Gryffindor and Ravenclaw Primaries feel drawn to both things. But when they clash, when they can’t have it both ways, then one of them is more important. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Similarly, Hufflepuff and Slytherin Primaries are people based. They're practical based -- it’s about what’s in front of you, it’s less about ideals. Slytherins prioritize the people they love most. And Hufflepuffs prioritize the people who are in the most need, the most vulnerable, who they owe most. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>And it doesn’t mean that Hufflepuffs love most the people who need them most, and it doesn’t mean that Slytherin Primaries will never go out of their way to help someone who needs them most. It just means that if there is someone who very much needs them and also their most important person is in trouble, then a Hufflepuff and Slytherin are probably going to make different choices.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Or even if they made the same choice, then one of them will feel like that was the right choice, and one of them will feel like a shitty person. We like to talk about-- this system is about what you feel and what is right, it’s not necessarily about what you </span>
  <em>
    <span>do</span>
  </em>
  <span>. It’s about what you wish you’d do if you were a better person. Because no one’s perfect. You sort people by how they </span>
  <em>
    <span>feel</span>
  </em>
  <span> about their choices, rather than what choices they </span>
  <em>
    <span>make</span>
  </em>
  <span>. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>For Secondaries, it’s about how you act. To put it the most simply, Gryffindors charge, Hufflepuffs work, Slytherins adapt, and Ravenclaws learn or prepare. Of course anyone can use all of those skills, all of those tools, but what we look at when we’re sorting is which falls easiest to their hand, which one is the most powerful for them. When they win what is it that led to their victory?</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>There’s also an important concept that is Burned Houses. You might be a Burned Secondary if you feel like if you just had more energy, if you were just a better person, more diligent, then you would do things this way. Even if you have a different way to do it, you think you </span>
  <em>
    <span>should</span>
  </em>
  <span> do it in a very specific way. Either by charging or leading (Gryffindor), by studying or strategizing or data collecting (Ravenclaw), by forming bonds and communities and doing really hard work (Hufflepuff), or by improvising or changing yourself to fit the context that you’re in (Slytherin),</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>And Primaries can burn, too. It’s when you feel like you can’t be moral. Can’t live up to what you believe of yourself. A Gryffindor who feels like they can’t tell what’s right and wrong. A Ravenclaw who feels like they can’t think, they can’t decide. A Hufflepuff who feels like they can’t help the people who need it, so they pull back and just help the small circle of people who they can. A Slytherin who feels like it’s impossible to love people, to have bonds, because either they hurt you or they get hurt or you hurt them-- but it's not safe, it’s not practical, it’s not reasonable so they pull back. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>But the important thing is-- they don’t stop wanting to live in a world where they could be that better person. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>And that’s true for all of the Burned Primaries Houses. It could be either that they feel incapable of living up to their own expectations of their morality, or they could feel like the world that they live in, the reality that they live in, doesn’t allow them to be the person they think they should be.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>And then we take all of these terms and we use them to talk about stories :)</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>And with that, I think it’s time we get started with the sorting portion of this episode. So let’s start with Katniss, our protagonist. Any thoughts on her Primary? </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>I would say that she is likely a Slytherin Primary based on how she does everything that she does basically  for Prim, her little sister.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>She does, doesn’t she?</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>She really does. It’s her call to action in the narrative. It’s how everything gets started. It’s what brings her back time and time again. It’s what keeps her motivated. Analogizing to her love for Prim is what helps her engage sometimes with bonding to other characters in the novels. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Oh like Rue!</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yes exactly like Rue! That parallel-- I had a lot of emotions about that parallel, and so did Katniss. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>That was a lot! And it makes sense-- because you could look at her being generous with Rue and think she’s a Gryffindor Primary, who’s acting out of goodness, or a Hufflepuff who’s acting out of seeing this vulnerable person who needs help. But with Katniss it had to be driven by her love for Prim. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Because that’s how Katniss experiences the world. Or at least that’s the impression I get. She loves Prim, she loves the other important individuals in her life. And she can understand other people making decisions and make her own decisions external to those specific people that she loves basically by analogy -- because that’s how she sees and meets the world. That’s how she empathizes with other people. “Oh, this is your version of Prim, I see!” </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>The heart of her morality-- her moral thoughts come from her love for other people. Which is the heart of our Slytherin Primary.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>And it’s compatible with how she fights for the rebellion, but I think it’s really important that the core for WHY she is fighting for the rebellion is to make a better world for her family, for Prim-- where Prim can be safe and where other people’s version of Prim can also be safe</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>It makes it really really personal.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>It does! Slytherin Primary is a really personal house. I think that’s one of the reasons why it comes off as so intense. Why even-- in some books, you have the Slytherin framed as evil and selfish and only caring about themselves and their people. And they’re not, always! And that’s certainly not inherently evil. And we see in Katniss, I think, a really interesting example of someone who doesn’t add on much morality on top of her Slytherin Primary. It’s just about that. That’s what she does to be righteous. That’s how she interacts with the world</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>And I almost wonder if in a different setting, Katniss might have had more morality to build on, but the people she loves-- the very small set of people she loves-- are so constantly in danger and so constantly in the forefront of her mind, she has no time to think about other moralities. The way someone in a safer world-- a Slytherin in a safer world-- might have to make more moral decisions that don’t have to do with "but what about Prim?" But with Katniss, “what about Prim?” is pretty much always a relevant question</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span> It is. Ah, Prim. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Those books are tough, man. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>They are. And she just spends all of the third book so out of it and upset. And I love them, but they’re sometimes hard to read because of that. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah. So, Primary-- Slytherin for Katniss i think. She’s one of the most Slytherin characters you’re going to come across for a Primary. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>I think that’s an easy sort. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, it’s a pretty easy sort. A bit of a cheat. What do we think for Secondary? </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>For Secondary? I think that… one of the most telling situations is when in book three or movie three she is put on camera and they tell her, "Here’s your script. Act. Be inspirational." And she can't do it. She tries -- it’s not because she doesn’t want to. But she can’t do it. And she was only able to really come into her own and be as effective as she’s capable of being when they let her loose and let charge and they let her rage against the injustice. And to me that says Gryffindor Secondary.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>It has to be an honest reaction for her to be effective. Her power comes from her improvisational choices. Her reactivity. Her honesty and her integrity. People believe her when she reacts because it’s so true.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>It’s very admirable. I get why it’s inspiring the way Gryffindor Secondaries are so honest and authentic. Because that really is inspiring. When I meet people who it’s almost overwhelming with how authentic they’re being... it’s vulnerable but it’s also such a strength. It’s really compelling. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>It is a really vulnerable House in a lot of ways, they don’t really have a lot of things to fall back on. They either are or are not. You see it with all of Katniss’s power, but it absolutely also makes her a really vulnerable character and a character so many people try to take advantage of because she’s so powerful. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>I do appreciate that for the most part she doesn’t let them. And when she does, it kinda of ties back to her Primary. They literally have to tell her, “If you do this, it’ll be good for Prim and Peeta” </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>But even then, when she wants to be the Mockingjay they’re asking her to be, if she doesn’t believe it herself then it doesn’t work. She can't do that on cue. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Which is so different from Peeta, who is so good at doing things on cue, but has that same air of believability. I think it really points to their different Secondaries. So i don’t think he’s a Gryffindor Secondary. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He doesn’t have to react with authenticity. He doesn’t have to be -- he can read a script and have it be effective. He can do emotion on purpose. And that makes him different than Katniss. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>He does still come across as very authentic though.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>He does, right? It’s impressive. But the fact that deep down it’s on purpose… means that whatever he’s using to build that authenticity I don’t think it’s Gryffindor. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>No, he doesn’t seem to charge, he doesn’t seem to inspire. It seems to be a lot more about being solid and available and consistent.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Which are some pretty classic hallmark traits of our Hufflepuff Secondary. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Especially because he’s a baker. The baker with the Hufflepuff Secondary is just a beautiful thing.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, that’s such a trope.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>We know he’s a Slytherin Primary because he prioritizes katniss so entirely over other people. I feel like one of the really big things that swayed me for him being a Slytherin Primary-- because I think Hufflepuff </span>
  <em>
    <span>is</span>
  </em>
  <span> another good sort for him-- is he’s so content. He’s happy. As long as Katniss is okay, he’s not going to feel like he’s a bad person for all the terrible things that are happening around him.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>He’s not tired enough to be a Hufflepuff Primary. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>No, it’s really hard to be a Hufflepuff and have bad things be happening to people around you and to be okay. It’s one of the beautiful and exhausting and confusing things about Hufflepuffs. But he’s so alright and his world is so bad and he knows it. And he’ll talk about it and he’ll care about it and he’ll say it’s not okay--but he can go home at the end of the day and if he’s okay and katniss is okay, then he’s okay. And that’s just really Slytherin Primary. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>It is.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>He’s soft but he’s a Slytherin Primary as well. It doesn’t have to look as hard as Katniss’s Slytherin Primary looks. Katniss has had to fight to keep her Slytherin Primary. Her life has been a lot harder than Peeta’s in a lot of ways. She’s had to cling to her Slytherin to keep from becoming Burned. When a Slytherin Burns, they think it’s too hard to care about people. They think that no matter what they do, people will leave them or hurt them or they will hurt their people. But there's something impossible about that being what drives their morality. So they leave. They burn it. They back off from those personal connections and they do something else but they always feel like they want it. They’re sad it’s not there. They're frustrated it’s not there. And Katniss didn’t Burn. She clung really hard to keeping herself someone who can care about Prim. And it’s why her Primary comes off as so much more rugged than Peeta’s, because he hasn’t lost that much. He can care a lot more easily. He doesn’t understand the way Katniss does how hard it is to care about people when you’re in such a precarious, vulnerable situation. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Even though neither of them are Burned, Katniss is having to try a lot harder to not burn. Because she understand how easily people can be taken away from her.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>And it gives them a very different feel as characters, even though they share the same Primary. And that's really fun. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>I think they bond over that, too. I think that's something Peeta really admires about Katniss. How much she embraces her love of Prim. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>It’s easy also to look at Peeta as a potential Hufflepuff Primary? A lot of the things he is doing-- he is helping people who are in need. Katniss was there starving, and he gave her bread. That’s very Hufflepuff. But as far as we know, Peeta was not giving everyone bread. Peeta had never before considered volunteering for The Hunger Games to keep someone alive. He specifically likes Katniss. And that's what makes him a Slytherin. And it’s not an uncommon thing, that if your Pov character has a nice soft Slytherin Primary character who loves them, that character is going to look sort of Hufflepuff to the narrative. Because you’re getting it from the Pov of someone who they do really care about and are really generous with. And that’s a fun sort of mis-sort that can happen. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>And that does remind me of some of our early conversations, too. Because you were like </span>
  <em>
    <span>clearly Slytherin</span>
  </em>
  <span>, and i was like </span>
  <em>
    <span>Hufflepuff though</span>
  </em>
  <span>. Because he has a Hufflepuff Secondary. He is such a hard worker. He shows up, he is a very steadfast presence for Katniss, both during the Hunger Games and even outside the Hunger Games. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>He’s reliable and he’s patient and whenever he has a victory-- his victories are so often very unobvious. Which is a very Hufflepuff Secondary thing. I think one of the thing that sways me toward Hufflepuff Secondary as opposed to Slytherin is-- he builds such good communities. And a lot of his power comes from people just liking him, even when it doesn’t seem like he’s set his goal on winning them over. He’s set his goal on protecting Katniss, and he’s doing all the work he needs to do to make that happen, and for that people fall for him. The people around him see his work and see his generosity and see his spirit and they want to help him. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Oh you know what? I think at first katniss thinks he’s a Slytherin Secondary and she learns he’s a Hufflepuff Secondary as she grows to trust him  because at first she’s like “you’re putting on a front for the camera, this is weird, this is dishonest, it makes me very uncomfortable.” </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Part of the thing she’s reacting to is Peeta </span>
  <em>
    <span>will</span>
  </em>
  <span> act differently in different spaces, and to Katniss this looks like lying. And she does I think come to the conclusion that Peeta doesn’t lie particularly. He lies sometimes, practically, but he doesn’t lie about what he’s feeling -- which is one of the things she was afraid of. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>She learned that he doesn’t fake it. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>So I feel like Hufflepuff Secondary is a good sort for him. When he wins, it’s because he’s been there the whole time, being patient, being kind, doing the work, paying attention, and then stuff happens or people help him who he has helped. It’s these culminations of the work he’s put in. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>That reminds me of that one scene where we see him in the mud and he’s painted his face and body with camouflage because he’s serious injured. And they had specifically showed us , when he was training for the Hunger Games, him learning that skill. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>And I think it also shows some interesting things in the differences between his skillset and Katniss’s skillset. And in a lot of ways, his skillset is a lot more suited to surviving the Hunger Games. Because he can play the game. Because Katniss, who is a Gryffindor Secondary, is very bad at playing games. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>She is! I love her for it. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Katniss can only do things if she actually feels them. If they're a true genuine reaction, she can act, she can do stuff, but a lot of Katniss’s power-- her ability to convince and inspire and change the world and have effect-- they only work if she can do it genuinely. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Which is why she is so bad at filming all those propaganda videos when they hand her a script. She’s just like, "why am I doing this, what is this, this is weird, I would rather be out fighting." This is not the skillset she likes using. And if they just understood that about her, it would have gone a lot smoother. And eventually they do learn that. They learn to just follow her around with a camera. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Exactly, right? The world was able to recognize that Katniss was really powerful in terms of she can inspire people, she changes the world, she causes unrest. She’s the Mockingjay. But when they try to weaponize that, they fail, because they keep handing her scripts. And if she just reads a script, she’s useless. And that’s one of the ways we can identify her as a Gryffindor Secondary. They’ve got to mean it. And they can’t just decide to mean it, they have to actually feel it. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Are we ready to move onto Gale? </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, let’s talk about Gale. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Gryffindor! </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>He is a bit Gryffindor, yeah. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>He’s so Gryffindor. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>He really likes that rebellion. And one of the really interesting things about Gale, is even though you look at him and you go ‘wow that’s a Gryffindor happening there,’ he has some really Slytherin characteristics. He does that Slytherin prioritization. He likes Katniss. And so he spends special attention and care taking care of Prim, of Katniss’s mother. So what makes us think he’s not a Slytherin? </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>I think he could be a Slytherin-- especially looking at that scene in the beginning of the first movie when he was like, "let’s run away together." And Katniss was like, "We can’t, I can’t bring Prim." But I mean that’s not very Gryffindor of him, saying let’s just run away. That’s rather Slytherin. That’s "I'm going to take care of you, let’s make sure that we’re okay."</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>And then he incorporates that information and goes okay fine I’ll prioritise Prim, too, and we see that continuing. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>But I think what happens when the rebellion gets going is he realizes there's actually a chance this rebellion could work, that he could do a lot of good, and there’s a switch. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>He sees that he can act, and the world will become better, and then he feels obligated to do so at the expense of himself, at the expense of the people, communities he cares about. And that's what makes me think he’s a Gryffindor Primary. He seems like when it really comes down to it, when the shit really hits the fan, and he needs to choose between Katniss and Katniss’s wants and Katniss’s needs and Prim-- and helping the world, it’s so obvious to him what the choice should be. And it’s so opposite to what Katniss think the choice should be. Katniss will always save Prim first. It is wrong to Katniss not to save Prim first. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>So what do we think Gale's secondary is? His methods? How does he get stuff done? </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>I think his Secondary might be burned. I’m not sure that we have any evidence of him preferring any particular methods. He seems to do whatever he feels is necessary for any situation. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>And none of it seems to give him joy and none of it seems to give him particular power or effectiveness. He just acts. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>He also doesn’t really seem to feel bad about not doing anything in a particular way-- or maybe he feels bad about all the ways he’s doing it? But we don’t see him really struggling with decisions about how to accomplish things. He just does whatever he thinks will work. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>And often when we have characters who they’ll do whatever it takes to work, we think they’re Slytherin Secondaries. Because they’re the flexible, the adaptive, the methods and means don’t matter, just whatever your goal is-- but that tends to come with a certain flexibility, a certain adaption, and also a certain joy and satisfaction in that dance. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>And I don't think he has that.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>I don’t think he has any joy or satisfaction. So yeah, I think a burned secondary. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>And I'm not even sure which one. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>It’s hard to tell which secondary he might have had, because we don’t see him before all the trauma of just living in his world happens, and we don’t see him particularly come to heal or come into his own. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>It’s possible he’s a Gryffindor Secondary looking at the way he loves Katniss. Because if he’s a Burned Gryffindor Secondary, then seeing Katniss in the full non Burned glory of her Gryffindor Secondary, then that would really attract him to her. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, she’s doing it right and he think she’s magical. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>I don’t think he thinks she’s magical because she’s a Slytherin, even though he’s willing to adopt that system for her. I think he’s a Burned Gryffindor Secondary just based on the fact that he thinks Katniss’s Secondary is magic. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>He thinks the right way to be is to be honest, to be forthright and brave and to act. And so I think we almost do see him heal a little. It’s just not in a way Katniss approves of. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>He goes off and he becomes a soldier.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Gale looks at the world and realizes he can have an effect on it. And then he goes out and acts. It’s just that because we’re looking at it through Katniss’s eyes, and she doesn’t approve of his priorities or the things he’s willing to do for his cause, that it gets painted with this tarred brush. But looking at it from Gale’s POV, he sees himself as righteous and i think he is finally really satisfied that he gets to act. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Oh, he’s a Gryffindor/Gryffindor. . </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Poor kid. A Gryffindor/Gryffindor in love with Katniss. That’s tough. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Oh that is tough. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Also I just wanted to point out, i really love how Unburned Katniss continues to be. She is a character who should be Burned, in her Primary, her Secondary. Her life has been really hard. Her world is really hard. And there are things that should have shaken her down and made her go ‘actually, these things I want to do and these things I want to be, maybe I can’t.’ And she just says ‘no.’ Prim gets to live. I don’t have to hide my light under a bushel. I get to yell, I get to act, I get to say no. And she just never really backs off from that. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>However, at the very end, I think she does burn a bit. She decides to stay with Peeta. She ends up having kids with him (although that felt like a weird ok boomer move to me). </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Oh I think you’re right. But I think it’s in the middle of the book when she Burns. When Peeta is taken and broken, that’s the first time she really Burns. Because it’s the first time she’s failed to be able to protect the people she’s supposed to protect. She’s been able to save Prim, up to that point. She’s been able to save Peeta. And she’s been able to have faith that they will be themselves. And she literally loses Peeta’s self. And I think there she does Burn some. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>I think what she Burns is her Secondary. She feels useless. She feels disempowered. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Oh no that’s really sad. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>I think her Secondary gets Burned in the third book when she loses Peeta. She gets him back, but not well-- it doesn’t seem like he ever fully heals. And then she loses Prim. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>And then she just detaches from the narrative. She puts her foot down. She says, "You don’t get to torture children, not even their chilren," to President Coin. And she just leaves the narrative. She Burns her Secondary. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>She stops acting. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yep. She doesn’t act anymore. So I think that’s what happens. And that’s why in some ways the third book is both really meaningful and really unsatisfying. It makes it a tragedy. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Augh. Well we can’t end on this note. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>The story destroys part of her. It just does. … Okay, so, we have Katniss our protagonist as a Slytherin Primary. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yes, she’s a Slytherin Primary and a Gryffindor Secondary. Which is a very powerful sorting and I love her very much. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>With that really pointed set of motivations, with a powerhouse Secondary. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>She makes a fantastic protagonist. The Gryffindor Secondary is probably the easiest to get the actions started as far as protagonists go. And then we have Peeta, who is a probably Slytherin Primary and definitely a Hufflepuff Secondary. Probably. Maybe maybe a Slytherin Secondary but i think we’re both feeling he’s a Hufflepuff Secondary. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>People just like him so much. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>They really do! And he’s got the baker trope going on and it’s just… </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>I don’t want to say that Slytherin Secondaries aren’t liked, but Peeta’s got that sort of Hufflepuff glow, what can I say?</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>And then there’s Gale, our Gryffindor/Gryffindor. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>With the worst life. Poor kid. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>The worst life. Kind of tried to pick up a Slytherin Primary Model for Katniss, but only until he realizes the world needed his Gryffindor and that he could actually make things happen. And then he drops it and he goes to save the world. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>So that’s a cast that’s very heavy on both Gryffindor and Slytherin. Which is part of I think what makes it so intense as a story, that these characters are so intense and so driven to action. And it's interesting too that the Slytherin and the Gryffindor Primary are both such internal morality systems. Unlike Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw Primaries, where they take a lot more out of their external world and system and cues, Slytherin and Gryffindor Primaries are both so tuned in with what they feel is just and righteous, whether it’s the people or the ideals that they see their world through.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>They're driven so internally, and they’re so certain that you end up with this really really intense narrative, especially when characters disagree.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>And I so really love the way that we see the characters learning where they have different allegiances to their moral systems. The way Katniss and Gale start out on such the same page until they’re really really not. Because Katniss goes on and continues being a Slytherin and Gale has to face the fact that she is not a Gryffindor and he is. And then Katniss and Peeta learn to trust each other and bond over that Slytherin Primary and Slytherin prioritization. And it just feels so warm in that nest of snakes. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>And because this is a coming of age story, as these characters grow up and learn more things about how they’re different from each other or similar to each other, it’s parallel to their journey of realizing they have power and agency in their world. That’s where a lot of the conflict is coming from: Gale realizing he has the power to change his world and feeling like he’s obligated to. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>And Katniss learning sometimes she can’t save the people she cares about most, and learning how to live with herself in a world like that and how to continue to be with Peeta in whatever ways she’s able to, despite having lost Prim and despite having in some ways lost an important part of Peeta.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>It’s just real cheery.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>So cheery. It’s the happiest series i think ever. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Emily:</b>
  <span> I think it does a wonderful job, and i think you’re right that a lot of the intensity comes from those really really internal Primaries. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>…</span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Alright! Thank you for listening. That was Episode One of Sorting Hat Chats. We have successfully made a podcast! </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Next time, we’ll be talking about The Witcher, specifically the first season of the excellent Tv show that just came out. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>In the meantime, we have a Sorting Hat Chats Wordpress site sortinghatchats.wordpress.com and there is a quiz that you can take that will sort you. It has branched logic trees which means you can argue with it! It is a good time and it is better at sorting people than we are. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Until next time! </span>
</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Sorting Avatar the Last Airbender</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Sorting Hat Chats sorts Avatar the Last Airbender</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>New friend Elisha C. very kindly stepped in &amp; transcribed this episode for us!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Emily:</b>
  <span> Hi, I’m Emily.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>And I’m Kat.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily:</b>
  <span> And we are Sorting Hat Chats.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>And today we are going to sort Avatar: the Last Airbender, the animated Nickelodeon show from my childhood.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily:</b>
  <span> In our Sorting Hat Chat system, we sort people into primary houses, which is why characters do things, and into secondary houses, which is how characters do things. We define the terms we’re using here in a little more detail in our pilot episode, on our Wordpress, and on our Tumblr. But in the meantime, let’s get to sorting.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>I don’t remember how we sorted Azula the first time we did this, but I get the feeling she’s a Slytherin primary? Kinda similar to Aang, all of the times when she totally freaks out or when the people closest to her betray her, which for some reason wasn’t totally intuitive to me. I think maybe just because she presents so much with her secondary, and we don’t really see much decision making other than doing what her dad says.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily:</b>
  <span> I also wonder if she’s a little burned, and that kind of also screws it up.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>The whole emotional, mental breakdown at the end doesn’t speak to someone who’s been solid and happy in their way of going about the world.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Right? Because that sort of gets triggered by Mai and Ty Lee betraying her, and that seems to, for her, really push her back into specifically then the time her mom also abandoned her. And so she has this long line of like abandonment trauma, and that’s the sort of thing that breaks her.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah. Oh Ursa.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Right? And so she doesn’t—Azula doesn’t seem to love Zuko in that way. She wrote Zuko off early, he was never in her Slytherin. But her dad is. Her mom was, I presume, at least enough that being abandoned by her really shook her.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, I have to imagine when Azula was really young, she was still close with her mother, but then when Ursa fell out with Ozai, and the parents each decided which kid was evil and which kid was great, then y’know.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Oof. Yeah, and then with, and it’s interesting, but there’s where I think—’cause she, like she has connections, so. But the reason I think she’s burned as a Slytherin anyway, cause generally burned Slytherins just don’t connect with people, she makes some very one-sided—it’s about, sort of, in some ways like possession? And she’s shook by betrayal, but she would also betray Mai and Ty Lee really easily, but she’s expecting loyalty from them while only ever really giving loyalty to her father, and even then it seems a lot more like fear and desperation than it does like loyalty.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, well Azula initially coerces Ty Lee into joining, because if I remember right Ty Lee said, “No, I’m really happy here with my family in the circus,” and Azula was like, “Cool, I’ll burn down everything unless you actually do come with me.” So starting off on that foot and then later being confused as to why Ty Lee doesn’t like her and betrays her</span>
  <b>. </b>
  <span>Unfortunately, that does smack of Burned Slytherin primary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Right, she’s trying to like artificially create the bonds that she would have as a healthy Slytherin, that she would have as someone who was bonding and giving loyalty and having these tight knit connections and instead she tries to create them using fear or power or leverage the same way her father does to her.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, because then she feels like she has control over it and control over them, and then they can’t hurt her. She can just hurt them, and that makes it safe.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>And then the thing that shakes is when she realizes even that, that fear and that power dynamics that she’s using, they aren’t in that. They’re still going to leave her.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, because that’s not, that’s not real. It’s just—it just looks like what she wants, but she can’t actually have what she wants unless she actually approaches it authentically.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Her mother didn’t love her enough to stay, and Mai and Ty Lee didn’t fear her enough to stay, and she doesn’t know what she could possibly have left to offer.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> So we think she is Burned Slytherin primary. What about her secondary? Probably also Slytherin secondary?</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Slytherin secondary and not burned at all. She’s so confident in her abilities and her power, that’s not a place she has any doubts, but it’s all improv. It’s all manipulation. She’s a really classically villainous Slytherin secondary. It’s clearly evil and slippery and playful in ways that are some of the stereotype, which is interesting because it’s a show that I think is pretty heavy with Slytherin secondaries of really different flavors. Cause I think Aang is a Slytherin secondary too, but he is not at all villainous in his.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> No, he’s so playful with his Slytherin secondary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>It’s happy and joyous and generous.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> He’s flighty.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, he’s flighty, but it’s still that same secondary, which is really really interesting. There’s a really beautiful diversity of nuance of how they present Slytherin secondaries in Avatar.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, especially once we get into Toph.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Toph, I also think a Slytherin secondary, and she just does it completely differently than either Azula or Aang.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, but we see how competent she is in Ba Singh Se when decides, “Ok, it’s going to be helpful now for me to turn on my class performance. I will go ahead and turn on my class performance. Oh, look, it’s perfect because I remember how to do this, and I am just able to interact in those contexts.”</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, and she finds that satisfying. It doesn’t feel like a model she built to survive her early life, it’s just something she does, and she’s like, “Yeah, this is what you do. Katara why are you bothered by this?”</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah she’s like, “It’s kind of annoying, sure, but like it’s not a problem.”</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, and then we also see her utilize that same sort of flexibility and ability to transform in areas of life she thinks are fun, like when they’re doing all the cons in the fire nation. But she spends most of her time in sort of a neutral state, where she’s not putting on anything. She’s just like whatever, which is also a Slytherin secondary thing.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> It is! It’s great, and it’s—instead of adapting, it’s just calling it like she sees it. She could use the information that she’s learning from everything around her that she would usually use to inform her improvisation, and instead she could just point at it bluntly and say, “Well that’s dumb.”</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>And it’s—she’s just existing. She’s not—it looks a bit like a Gryffindor secondary, which is somewhat confusing, right? Because Gryffindor secondaries are sort of forthright, honest, direct, blunt house. But Slytherin secondary has this thing which we call the neutral state, cause Slytherin secondaries normally are really adaptive, flexible house, but when they’re feeling comfortable or they’re feeling they don’t have to do things, they just drop a lot of that play and a lot of that work they’re doing, and they just are. And what makes it different from a Gryffindor secondary is they don’t feel obligated to that honesty. Y’know, they don’t feel like they have to be themselves, and that’s part of their self and their power is to have integrity and to act as they are. It’s just that when they don’t give a shit, they don’t give a shit, and then they’re just there. And they’re fine. And that’s, that’s the neutral state of the Slytherin secondary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Definitely reminds me of the idea of being comfortable with uncomfortable silences.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>And Toph’s just so confident and okay, and she has sort of, in some ways, very minimal ambitions as a person. She wants to brawl sometimes, she wants to see the world, she wants to make Sokka squawk, and like she doesn’t really—she’s pretty fine. There’s nothing she’s really chasing after the way a lot of the characters do, and there’s not much she’s really afraid of. So she gets to just live in this neutral state all the time where she’s just really comfortable, and she’s just not performing at all. But she’s still a Slytherin secondary because a) she doesn’t feel obligated to be honest the way a Gryffindor secondary would, who also kind of looks blunt, but also because we see her step into that flexibility and adaptation and even manipulation just easily and comfortably and without any angst in her soul. It’s not a model that she’s covering her true self up with. It’s just what you do.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> So that kind of brings up an interesting question which is, if she is to some extent, not in a bad way, but she’s a little bit along for the ride. She’s there because she’s teaching Aang earthbending. I think she’s also there because she’s excited about the idea of going on an adventure and seeing the world. So what does that say about her primary? Because on one hand, she’s … I don’t really get a loyalist vibe from her. I guess I could see a very chill loyalist house, either Slytherin or Hufflepuff, but there’s nothing specifically pointing to that. It seems more like it’s—it seems like an internal primary cause I don’t see her really looking outside for any of it. So do we think it’s maybe Gryffindor?</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>I definitely agree she’s an internal primary and not an external one cause yeah she, whatever her morality is, whatever her drive is, she gets it from inside herself. She does not care what anyone else thinks, people or society or any of that. She’s just like, “I’m right.” But yeah, our two internal houses being Slytherin or Gryffindor, it’s sort of a hard call because whichever one it is, she doesn’t—she’s chill.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She doesn’t really—if she’s a Slytherin, her parents aren’t in her Slytherin. If she’s a Slytherin, no one was in her Slytherin when they first met her. Y’know, it might be the Gaang later grows to be and she builds those sort of bonds with them, I think is possible. If she’s a Gryffindor, she’s a Gryffindor who doesn’t care about a lot. Her internal gut, her internal sense of morality and justice, does not hang on a lot of things. She’s not Korra, to use an in universe example. So, but you have Gryffindors like that. Like Jayne Cobb from the Firefly series. He’s a Gryffindor, he just doesn’t give a shit. His main morality is like, “I’m good, ok, whatever.” And that’s still a Gryffindor, because he’s still driven first and foremost by what he thinks is right. It’s just there’s not a lot of right and wrong that inherently matters to him.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, and if she’s a Slytherin, then I think mostly she’s in her Slytherin, and then she also likes other people sometimes.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>I would think that by the end of the series, the Gaang is probably in her Slytherin. Like she does definitely grow closer to themand value and worry about them. But that could just be friendship. People who aren’t Slytherin also have friends.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> That’s true! Thank goodness.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Are there any points where she’s really driven into a corner? Where she has to like make decisions between conflicting options? I think part of the problem might just be that Toph isn’t given many places where her choices are really challenged.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> I think you’re right. Like I can’t think of many. I mean, she decides to leave home and travel with them, but that doesn’t actually give us data one way or the other. That just tells us that if she’s a Slytherin, her parents aren’t in her Slytherin.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, but she does, remembering that episode, she does seem to like them. Her parents. She doesn’t seem to value them. And so that kind of pushes me towards Gryffindor for her because it’s not that she didn’t care for them. It’s just that when it went to “I want to leave and see the world” vs “You don’t want me to,” the place she fell where she really felt satisfied and free was “I’m gonna do it anyway. It’s more important to follow my heart than to listen to you and to keep you happy.” Which like, that seems pretty Gryffindor primary. It’s just divorced from like justice or ideals, which is fine. That’s still Gryffindor.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, and I think that also explains why we don’t see anything specifically Slytherin about her relationships with the rest of the Gaang, that we don’t notice any point at which she’s like, “Ah yes, you’re in my inner circle now, but this other person is not.” It seems to be so much more a continuum of affection and not really intrinsic to her decisions or even how she treats people.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Okay, so Gryffindor. Gryffindor/Slytherin. I kind of want to go back to Aang a bit and talk about his Slytherin secondary as our third Slytherin secondary example.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, I would like that. We did a bit skip over him to get to Toph.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Well, Toph is great, so that's extremely fair.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> And it’s interesting too because when Aang is learning how to earthbend, he and Toph just don’t see eye to eye at all.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, even though they’re both using their Slytherin secondary for their bending, you know, he’s flexible and he’s avoiding obstacles, and he’s, you know, reacting to everything. He has this really fluid way he [bends] that gives him a lot of power to kind of be a step ahead. I think we see that most whenever he fights with Zuko because they’re both really active fighters, and Aang is just running circles around him. It’s very Slytherin secondary, but so is how Toph earthbends.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, the way Toph earthbends is very much from her neutral state. It’s very much from her just acknowledgment of reality and deciding what it is and kind of telling the metal or the earth what to do. It’s so straightforward and blunt in this really elegant way. I love Toph a lot.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, without being charge-y, right?</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, no it’s not charge-y. It’s so chill.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, we talked sometimes that Gryffindor secondaries are the unstoppable force, right? They move, they act. And Slytherin secondaries and their neutral state are the immovable object. Once you get a Slytherin secondary down to their neutral state where they’re not feigning and dodging and reacting the way Aang does, they’re just solid. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Cause there’s a lot of sort of self-knowledge and self-comfort and self-awareness in the Slytherin secondary? It’s part of why a Slytherin secondary feels comfortable, you know, adapting and putting on all these other faces and acting all these ways that maybe aren’t inherently who they are, that thing that drives Gryffindors crazy. Because the Slytherin knows who they are, so what does it matter what they act like? And so when you get them down to just who they are, and they’re not acting anymore, you don’t have any power to change them at that point.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> No, especially not if they’re a Gryffindor primary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Especially not if it’s Toph. You have no power over Toph.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, but I do—I think that Aang doesn’t learn that lesson. It’s not like Aang gets in tune with his neutral state. That’s not the feeling I get, and it’s—I don’t really get neutral state from him kind of ever.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah that kid is always moving.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, and that’s actually—that’s kind of cool too and that’s something that I’m not sure we’ve called out explicitly that not all Slytherin secondaries really engage with a neutral state.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>It’s sort of a term we came up with to explain how someone could be a Slytherin secondary when sometimes they just go blunt. Even though that still seemed to be where they fit in our system. But it’s an option for a Slytherin secondary. It’s not like if you don’t do this then you aren’t. But Aang doesn’t. So how do we think he’s doing the earthbending then? If he’s not paring down to a neutral state that acts as it the way Toph is.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> He eventually figures out earthbending kind of at the end of that episode, when Sokka’s in trouble, and Aang needs to save him, and that’s very typical of a lot of when Aang suddenly gets his shit together. After a long time of failing to get his shit together, and I think it speaks to his Slytherin primary. “Oh, my friend’s in danger. Oh okay, this actually matters then.”</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, that’s what drives him forward, and so it’s like, with earthbending, you need to find a place where you’re solid, where you can stand your ground, and Toph does that with her neutral state, but Aang has to use his Slytherin primary because that’s where’s he’s solid. That’s where you can’t sway him anymore, is on: this rampaging moose creature shouldn’t kill Sokka. Aang can stand by that.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, that’s a very clear, clear decision in his mind. That’s a solid foundation with which he can move rocks.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yes, exactly. Yeah, cause Aang is—it’s sometimes a controversial sorting when we’ve talked about this before, but Aang is a Slytherin primary. I’ve had a lot of people tell us that we’re wrong on that.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> And like, I see why. I mean, his job is the Avatar, it’s to value all people. His goal is to save the world.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah those seem like not terribly Slytherin things.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, he cares a lot about people. He likes doing what’s right. He likes taking care of people and helping people, it’s something that he finds compelling and brings a lot of action, and you know, he’s the protagonist.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, and you also get—he also has a lot of his conflicts, especially his final conflict in the finale, wrap around this airbender ideal of pacifism. He cares a lot about this kind of idealistic question. “I’m a pacifist, I don’t want to kill Ozai,” and that’s a major conflict for him, and that also doesn’t seem very Slytherin.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> No, and there’s also—we see his big dilemma when he’s opening up his chakras to reaccess the avatar state, and we spend like several episodes, or possibly just one episode that made a large impression on me, where he has to let go of Katara in order to finish opening his chakras and be able to access the avatar state in a way that he needs to, and at first he says “No, I won’t do it,” which is very Slytherin, but at the end of the day, he does do it. He lets her go, and he makes that decision, and that doesn’t seem—that seems like him maybe even choosing not to be a Slytherin primary in action. But I think that’s one of the things that is kind of cool about our system, is that you don’t always have to make the decision that would make your primary feel the most satisfied.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, your –the sorting depends what you want to do and what makes you feel a good person or what makes you feel satisfied, more than it is what you actually do. So I think, Aang is in a similar position as we decided that Lan Xichen was in our Untamed episode where he is a Slytherin primary. That’s his drive, and we see that a lot. We see it with when Appa is taken, whenever Katara or Sokka are in danger. That’s when Aang is suddenly just running on instinct and doing these major things. At the end of the day, he loves his people, his small set of people, and he will just tear things apart to keep them safe. But, we also see these really important moments with struggling over pacifism and killing Ozai, struggling over opening his chakras where he’s sort of making other choices.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah to some extent, I think it might be an intellectualizing over the priorities that he holds closest because we see that a lot with Lan Xichen too when he—not to go off on that too much because not everyone has watched the Untamed—but when he decides that it is better for him to let his little brother be punished instead of turning up the entire society. That’s ultimately probably better for everyone, right? And I think with Aang, you see something similar where it’s ultimately going to be better for everyone if he ends this war the way that he feels is actually right.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah and I think those struggles that look like they’re not Slytherin, in Aang’s case-- which is actually different than Lan Xichen’s I’m realizing. Cause Lan Xichen actually squishes his Slytherin because he thinks Ravenclaw’s probably more ethical, and he kinda thinks he’s a bad person. It’s complicated-- But with Aang, I think they’re actually evidence of his Slytherin primary. So we look at the two we talked about with Aang trying to unlock his chakras and at first refusing to let go of Katara to gain the avatar’s power. The thing that eventually convinces him to let go of Katara is that he realizes he can’t protect them if he’s not powerful, so he gives up Katara and his love for her—his connection to her—so that he can save her. Cause they’re in danger, and that’s what finally triggers him to make that choice and that sacrifice. It’s still a Slytherin motivation.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And with the finale and him struggling so hard over killing Ozai and giving up his pacifism, I think it’s about Gyatso. I think it’s about the air nomads. His entire world died. His father figure who he loved entirely, who triggers his first avatar state explosion, he died, and there’s nothing of them left except for Aang. And so he desperately doesn’t want to let go of one of his last connections to them, which is their pacifism. Which is his father’s belief that he trained and raised Aang in, and they’re really important to him, I think not because they’re right or because he’s thought about them and decided they’re ethical or because he believes they’re ethical but because they were Gyatso’s, and it’s the last part of Gyatso that are alive.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yes. Yes yes yes yes. That. That thing you just said, yes.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Right? And so he’s still—he’s acting in this Slytherin way. It’s more important to keep Gyatso alive than to defeat the fire lord and save the world. It would hurt him so much. He might still do it, because you know, Katara is alive, Sokka is alive, but it would hurt him so much to kill that last bit of Gyatso to save the world. And in the same way, it would hurt him—he can’t let Katara be hurt, so he has to give her up to open his last chakra. His choices are always, at the end of the day, about the people he loves.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah and about not betraying them, even betraying their memory because I think that’s something that was kind of implicit in what you said, but I just want to make it a little bit more explicit, which is I feel like Aang would feel like he was betraying Gyatso if he went against that pacifism.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah and we even see it somewhat in Korra, which is where Aang clearly spent his life trying to keep the air nomads alive. And he succeeded. They’re still in the world now. Even though in ways he doesn’t seem very Slytherin primary, I think he is. You also see it a bit in the moments where he gets to be selfish. I’m thinking of the Bato of the Water Tribe episode, where it’s for the first time he’s really afraid that Sokka and Katara are going to leave him to go back to their father.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> That’s right, and he hides the letter.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>He hides the letter. It’s—That was one of the first episodes that convinced me of both his primary and his secondary because he just—it felt like sort of the very typical, sinister Slytherin secondary for the first time, which helped me reframe all of his playful antics. Oh that’s Slytherin secondary too! You’re much happier there, please stick with that. But that’s the first tool that falls to his hand, and the thing he feels guilty about is betraying his friends, not lying to them. You know, it’s his reasons, not his methods that bothered him there.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, definitely. Yeah I can’t remember off hand other times when he’s lied to them to protect them, but I’m sure there were those times, and I’m sure he didn’t feel bad about it.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Oh yeah, he lies all the time. He’s just chill with that. It’s only when the lying is a betrayal that he’s bothered really, and that’s actually—that’s in season one. He’s a really immature Slytherin early on, and he grows a lot over the seasons. And being able to not just want to possess and have people, but wanting to, you know, support and love and protect people, which are sort of different mindsets of the Slytherin primary. He’s a healthier and better friend as he grows.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Okay. So, those are our three Slytherin secondaries, who all look very, very different in how they perform that secondary. I don’t think either Katara or Sokka are Slytherin secondaries.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> No. No, I don’t think so. </span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>They’re bringing some other tools to the table.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yes. Katara is so fiery. She charges. We see that at the end of season one, or kind of close-ish to the end of season one, when she’s like “No. I will learn waterbending.” Like I feel like she finds such strength in standing up for herself and others and speaking her truth.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>She’s also really inspirational. There are a bunch of moments where Katara like stands on piles of things and like shouts? Like in the prison episode. The floating prison with all the captive earthbenders? She like starts a prison riot, and she does that in different circumstances. She has a really strong ability to lead and inspire and act in ways that make the people around her also then be driven to act.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> She also really does enjoy caretaking. We see those episodes where she’s very motherly, but that doesn’t seem quite as intrinsic to her.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, so it seems like we’re kind of torn for her between Gryffindor secondary, which is forthright and honest and bold integrity and inspires others by example, and Hufflepuff secondary, which would be hardworking, dedicated, supportive, warm. And I think a lot of people see Katara, especially early on, as a Hufflepuff secondary. She’s team mom. She does maintain that throughout the season. She very much acts in many ways as a surrogate mom to Sokka, even though she’s his baby sister, and she’s mothering towards a lot of the characters, even Aang, her … boyfriend. Anyway, different conversation. But I think it’s a model. I think it’s what she’s supposed to be doing. I think it’s a model she got from the water tribe.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yes, I agree because so much of her character arc is in her embracing that desire to stand up and be inspirational, and it doesn’t mean that she has to give up her caretaking. It becomes less important to her. It becomes less vital in comparison to standing up for what she believes in.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>She likes caretaking, and she will do it. It’s a good skill, and it gives her a lot of good things, but at the end of the day, Katara just really wants to punch a fire nation soldier in the face. I mean it’s—I think it’s in that first season you get a really strong arc for Katara, specifically about her behavior and her role in the society and in the group. So she starts out in the Southern Water Tribe, where she’s basically the little mother, right? And then we end with the conflict with Pakku, the waterbending teacher in the North, where she’s explicitly told, “No women are supposed to heal and cook and caretake. Men are supposed to punch.” And Katara is like, “I have discovered I really like punching, and I would like to also punch please, and if you will not let me, I will punch you.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>And it works, and she gets to kind of transform and break some barriers there, and she gets to feel allowed to do that. She’s allowing herself to do that, to say “No, I don’t care that this is what I’m supposed to be, that I’m supposed to be, you know, my mother. I’m going to fit here in this space where I want to be, and I’m going to punch things really hard.”</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> It brings her a lot of joy.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>It does! And it’s also really interesting how it ties into her gender performance. It’s so gendered, explicitly in the show. “No, you’re supposed to be a Hufflepuff,” “Sorry, I’m a Gryffindor, I punch things in the face.” And we also get this parallel journey that’s also gendered with Sokka. Cause he starts out looking like a Gryffindor secondary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> He does. He puts on such airs.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, right? He’s supposed to be the leader, and he’s supposed to be the leader for being inspirational and brave and powerful, the ways that his father is and the ways that the men of his tribe are supposed to be.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> But he’s just not that.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, it’s not who he is, which is interesting because he is actually a strong leader character. You get that a lot in, especially season three where he’s one of the commanders and the strategist, but that’s it. He’s a strategist general. He’s not an inspirational general. He’s not a Gryffindor, he’s a Ravenclaw.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yes, he is, and watching him build his skillsets is so enjoyable, and we see that even from the earlier seasons too. We see that in his interaction with the Kyoshi Warriors.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>He meets them and he’s like, “Hey you have a power I don’t have. Can I learn it?”</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, but first he has to fight his own pride. He has to fight his own Gryffindor secondary performance of “Hey ladies. I’m a strong man. I can punch stuff. I’m already on top of this.” And then they show him that no actually. He’s wrong. And at first he responds with pride, and it’s only after he is really just like beaten a lot in sparring that he’s willing to come back and accept that it’s not his place to be the teacher. It’s his place to be the student here.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, he sort of gets to—they help him dismantle this story his society has told him about who he is and how he is supposed to act and this sort of pride and power he’s supposed to be giving, and it gets to move him to this place of humility where he’s finally able to learn, which is what he’s good at. Learning and growing and building new things out of that knowledge. Just like Katara is figuring out that the Hufflepuff she’s told she’s supposed to be, she doesn’t have to be, she can actually be the Gryffindor that she is, the skillset that comes naturally to her, Sokka is realizing he doesn’t have to be a Gryffindor secondary to be a man, to be himself, to be useful. He actually can just be a Ravenclaw secondary.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And unlike Katara, Sokka just dismantles Gryffindor. He doesn’t bring it back, which is a fun contrast. Because Katara does like the Hufflepuff. She keeps it around. She keeps supporting and caretaking. It’s something that she values even though it isn’t what she wants to be at her heart. But Sokka just goes straight Ravenclaw, which is really fun.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, because I think he’s really Ravenclaw even in the beginning. Like in the first episode, he’s just already struggling with his pride while trying to assure Katara that actually he is the best fisher, and he can catch the fish, even as Katara is showing him she is much more qualified at efficiently catching fish, but it’s still his pride about his skillset that he knows he wants to have, he knows he should have.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, he just needs to get to the place where he’s actually capable of learning and having that humility, which lets him actually really interact with his Ravenclaw. And interestingly, Katara is also totally being her Gryffindor secondary self in the beginning. It’s her rage and her need to set injustices straight and yell at her brother that breaks the iceberg, starts the story, and brings Aang back into the world. Her Gryffindor secondary and her allowing herself to be angry at injustices is what kickstarts the story.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, it’s a really satisfying gender subversion.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, and I love that the brother and sister get paired gender subversions because so often—I do feel like we often get stories where it’s like, “Oh, the woman doesn’t have to be the caretaker. She can fight,” and I like that a) Katara is still allowed to caretake, even though we establish it’s not natural for her necessarily, and I love that Sokka gets the parallel journey of “You don’t have to be that type of manly, shouty leader. You can be this type of power instead, and you’re still gonna get respect and interaction. You get to decide what kind of man you want to be, but there’s also flexibility in masculinity and the sort of person you can be inside of that gender.”</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, we get an example of not just his beginning, when he’s suffering from toxic masculinity, but also a really great example of dealing with that and really moving past that and coming into what’s a lot more satisfying for him.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>And both in a personal way where he’s figuring out how he wants to act to be, what it is to be a man in society, and what it is to be himself, but also how he wants to interact with the people around of him of various other genders and the power dynamics and the respects and his transformation of his relationship with Suki from the very heavy-handed, feminism for 11 year olds Kyoshi Warriors episode to the Boiling Rock stuff, where they’ve come a lot farther and he’s a lot more fettled and able to interact in that space. It’s a fun time and a cool thing to see in a kids’ show. So that’s Katara and Sokka’s secondaries. Gryffindor for Katara with a nice Hufflepuff model she keeps, Ravenclaw for Sokka and a Gryffindor model that he does not keep. What do we think about their primaries?</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> I could see either Gryffindor or Hufflepuff for Katara.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah she’s very felt. She doesn’t think about it.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> No, no she doesn’t. It’s about her learning to listen to her gut in a lot of ways.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Trust herself .</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, it’s a lot about self-trust. I think her—I’m leaning towards Gryffindor for her because while people definitely matter to her, we do see a lot of that “No but this is right, this is wrong. There are ideals here and I care about them.” </span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>I do feel that all the ideals though, they’re always triggered by people in need directly in front of her.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> That’s true.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Y’know because she’s constantly distracted from their main mission.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Oh that’s an excellent point.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Which is this idea of what’s right and wrong, to be like “Oh, this village? There’s a village right here that needs help.” But with the Painted Lady episode, where she slows down their quest to go save the entire world because this one village needs help and she saw their suffering.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Oh that’s a really good point yeah.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Right? Because she’s always seeing there’s an individual suffering, and she’s like “Hello, you are now my purpose.” And then she charges at it and punches the evil in the face because she’s a Gryffindor secondary. It’s great. But I think she’s a Hufflepuff primary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah that makes sense.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Sokka, I don’t think is a Hufflepuff primary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> No.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>He’s—he makes decisions. He’s not a felt house, he’s a decided house I think. His morality comes from like once he really comes into being a moral person. He thinks about things, and he makes decisions, and then he sticks with them, which leaves us with either Ravenclaw or Slytherin, are our two decided houses. Slytherin’s decide on their people where their loyalties lie, and Ravenclaws decide on what is right and wrong. They have to assess things and not feel them.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah. Of those two, I think Ravenclaw. I do not get Slytherin vibes off of Sokka.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, he does seem to be interacting much more in the ideal space than a loyalist space. But he loves people, he loves his sister, but he’s trying to do the right thing. That’s what’s driving him places.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, he decides that he was wrong about the Kyoshi Warriors and changes his mind about sexism in a way that he’s spent a lot of time thinking about.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, once he realizes, “Man, I shouldn’t be sexist,” it suddenly really important for him not to be that. Then he puts in the work to learn it, and it sticks with him for the rest of the show. And it’s very much not a gut decision. His gut is still saying, “Oh, why bother? You called me girl. What I have to wear a dress?” He’s interacting with all these things, and he has very strong gut reactions to everything, but it seems really important to him to put those gut reactions aside and do what is actually right. Yeah, and that kind of divide of what you feel is right and what you do is a very Ravenclaw way of interacting with that. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Okay, yeah so Sokka’s a Ravenclaw/Ravenclaw then. And he doesn’t even keep his Gryffindor secondary, so he’s just straight up Ravenclaw and very happy with it.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Sokka. I love him. Yes. </span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah he’s one of my favorites. I always love in a magical adventure party, the guy with the boomerang. The guy with the boomerang is almost always gonna be my favorite. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>So this leaves us with, of course, one of the most important and engaging characters in all of Avatar: Zuko. We’ve haven’t talked about it at all yet. He’s one of the most interesting redemption narratives in fiction, I think. They do a wonderful job. They avoid so many pitfalls that everyone else hits in redemption narratives, and they come out with this really really satisfying character who goes from a villain in episode one to not in season three in a way that feels just entirely satisfying.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, they really take their time with it. They really take us through step by step. There’s not a lot of redemption that happens off screen.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, I think showing it all is really important, not making us take it on faith, and then something else that’s really powerful about Zuko is they start doing it in season one. He doesn’t swap to their side until mid-season three, but he’s starting to see that journey in the first few episodes of season one. Part of that is having Iroh there to be a sympathetic point of view, part of that is setting him up against Zhao all the way through season one, where he too is fighting the fire nation. Setting him up in a position of also being an underdog, with being banished and being—the scar from his father. All of that set up, he too is wronged by the actual villain. And part of that is episodes like The Storm, where we get to see his beginnings of a journey to being able to act in a heroic and compassionate way. The things that he is told that he was originally not supposed to do but have always been part of his instincts. Because that’s why he got banished originally, right? He was protesting the sacrifice of young troops with a cause.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah. So that seems—to me that sounds very Hufflepuff. It seems like a lot of his morality is changing as his community changes.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, as he sees other people’s humanity, it becomes harder for him to stand against them. Like his whole arc in season two where he’s interacting in Ba Sing Se and in the earth nation in general. Like the Zuko Alone episode is amazing. He’s meeting people, and he’s caring about them and driven to help them in ways that then make him—that make it much more of a struggle for him to stick with his father. But he still does make that decision at the end of season two. He just feels really shitty about it.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> And that’s interesting too because it was framed for him as choosing between two different communities very much tied together with two different moral paths.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Also his whole journey is he wants to go home. That’s the ambition he starts the show with is he wants to go home.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, only then he realizes that home wasn’t as good as he thought it was.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, and that more important than him wanting to go home, is him wanting to be part of a world that isn’t broken. And in the course of him going off and deciding he’s going to fight for having a world that’s less broken, he finds a new family, but that wasn’t his intention at that point. He’d grown out of it. It’s sort of like how we were talking about Aang becomes a more mature Slytherin. He goes from wanting to possess people and not lose them to wanting to love and protect them, Zuko goes from wanting desperately to have a community that accepts him to wanting to help the community around him. That’s his ambition in the second half, and that’s changing to be a mature mature and moral character like that, and it does seem to be in a very Hufflepuff way, is what eventually gives him the original thing that his heart was after, which is a home and a community. Which is—that’s sweet.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> And it’s similar to Katara’s Hufflepuff in the way that a lot of the times where he makes those important decisions and these changes, it’s about the people in front of him. It’s about choosing to steal the ostrich horse, and then it’s about helping and learning about the refugees.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, his sympathies are triggered by people who are standing in front of him. But it takes him like two seasons to act on those in a more holistic way than a social moment by moment way. Because he starts off struggling a lot. But yeah I think he grows in to a nice, mature Hufflepuff primary. What about secondary for him?</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> We do see especially as a kid in Zuko Alone, we see him really step up and kind of get shouty. He’s very shouty. </span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>He’s very shouty. Very punchy. Just very firebendery thing.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> But he also becomes less so as we go through the show. He becomes a little bit less punchy and a little bit more open to listening and to talking things through, and he finds some humility that doesn’t seem to be compatible with his punchiness, so I feel like if he were a Gryffindor secondary, then he would’ve renegotiated his relationship with that kind of forthright advocacy instead of how he actually changes, which feels a little Hufflepuff maybe?</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, I think, we were talking earlier about how bending was kind of representative of some of people’s primaries and secondaries and how they were sort of implementing them in the real world, and one of the things that Zuko learns that’s pretty thematically important to him is the lightning bending. Specifically, he has no ability to lightning bend. He cannot trigger lightning. It takes a cold, internal sense of power and surgency that Zuko just does not have. But he does learn how to redirect, how to take violence directed at him, and take it in and hold it and send it elsewhere where it can’t hurt anyone, which is really interesting.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> It is, and we see him doing a lot of hard work from the very first episodes, even though it’s not helping him much, but he spends hours meditating. It’s just the meditating doesn’t help much.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah and he also, the search for the avatar itself is like nose to the grindstone, “I’m just going to slowly scour the world and never give up.” Though I think that kind of perseverance can be—I think both Hufflepuff and Gryffindor are really good at that kind of perseverance. Just beating their heads at brick walls until the brick wall goes away. I think … I do think he might be a Gryffindor secondary still though. I think he likes Hufflepuff secondary? I think he might grow that model. I think it’s what Iroh is. I think Iroh’s a Hufflepuff secondary, and Zuko learns a lot from him. But I’m thinking about the dragons that teach him how to firebend better. Because he was firebending with rage. Very punchy, very violent Gryffindor. He was firebending with rage, and once he leaves his father’s domain, he stops being as full of rage, and he stops being able to firebend, and so he and Aang go on their field trip to figure out what firebending really is.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Oh, and you think he might start firebending from his primary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>I’m having thoughts. I think he gets told, you don’t have to be angry to fight. You don’t have to be angry to step up and be brave and powerful and strong and forthright. It doesn’t have to come from that place. It can come from a place of love and connection, and I do think that’s driven by he’s now finally got this Hufflepuff that is actively trying to make the world better and is reaching out with love and generosity, and that’s triggering why he wants to firebend? But I think he might still be firebending with his Gryffindor secondary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, because he does continue to be inspirational.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, I think it’s changing the context in which he’s seeing his actions. He’s not acting out of rage anymore. He’s acting out of love, but his actions are still forthright and honest and blunt and powerful. But now he gets to be inspirational and warm and protective and part of an army that’s fighting for a good cause. And so it’s so much more satisfying for him. Part of this is I just really want him to house-share with Katara. I just think they’re really good foils. Because they’re definitely both Hufflepuff primaries. Katara’s like, “The fire nation are monsters. They’re not people. We can just kill them, it’s fine,” and Zuko’s really like, he’s also got that whole “My people are people.” Then he’s like, “Oh shit, everyone is people.”</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, that’s true. They both are coming at it from those different perspectives. Katara finds it so difficult to acknowledge Zuko as a human being.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yes, which is a wonderful journey. His Hufflepuff gets healthy and expansive before hers does, which is really fun, and I just love them as foils. I just—I kind of just really want them to have the same secondary? But it’s like, their field trip, more so than any of the other field trips that Zuko has in that third season, is just really illuminating to how similar they are as people. He looks at her, he looks at her rage, and he looks at her desire for revenge and her bitterness and her love and her inability to let things go and says, “Okay. I get that. I really do. That’s an understandable place for you to be at, and the way we deal with that is I take you to the person who killed your mother, and we stand in the rain and we look at him. And I say do you wanna kill him? Cause I will let you, and I will help you.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>And that’s the thing that Katara needed, which Aang does not understand, and Sokka just does not either, and Toph doesn’t care, which is great. I love Toph. But Zuko understands that that was the closure Katara needed, was to look at this man and be like, “You hurt me in the worst way I’ve ever been hurt. You did an inarguably evil act, and you are a person, and I recognize that, and I could murder you in this rain right now. I have the power, and I’m not going to. And it’s for me and not for you.” And that works. Zuko’s like “Yeah!” and Katara’s like “Oh, you are a person,” and it’s a great little journey, and I think it’s coming of a place of them being really similar with their love and their rage being so intermingled.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yes, I love that, and it reminds me of when Zuko at the end of season three confronts Azula, and I don’t remember verbatim what he says, but he essentially confronts her, and he confronts her in a very honest and straightforward way that matters to him a lot that he does that.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, and when he confronts his father as well, the thing that’s really satisfying for him that he needed to do was to stand in front of his father and tell him straight on, “You hurt me, and you shouldn’t have, and you can’t hurt me anymore, and I’m a good person who deserves to live.”</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Oh, I didn’t realize that—I’m not sure like how intentionally it was, but that’s such a callback to what we just talked about with Katara standing there in front of the person.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Oh! You’re right, yeah. They both went and they confronted the person who hurt them most.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, and that person was like, “You could kill me,” and they were like, “Yes I could, but I’m not going to.”</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>And it’s—yeah, there’s a reclaiming of power they needed, and there’s a—not forgiveness but recognition of hurt they really needed to do, and they just have really similar pathways there for their childhood hurts. What they have to do to go confront them. Whereas Aang did not need to go confront the person who murdered his whole society.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> No, that would change nothing for him.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>You know, Sokka who was also deeply hurt by their mother’s death, by the constant war, by all of that, he also has no need to confront with that. Sokka’s moved on. Sokka’s thinking about sexism and society and how to build flying air balloons. Sokka’s satisfied with that kind of building. That’s how he lives his life and grows. But Katara and Zuko both have this deep seated need to go and say what they needed to say and stand where they need to stand and decide what they need to do. It just feels really similar.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Oh, I love that they house-share.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Right? No, it makes me really happy. And they also both model Hufflepuff secondary I think. I didn’t realize Zuko did, but I think you’re right that you pointed that out. I think maybe he burned his Gryffindor after his father burned him cause that’s the thing he did. His father said, “Ok we’re gonna put all the new kids on the front line cause they can just die and slow stuff down and that’ll be fine,” and Zuko stood up in the chambers and said “No, that’s wrong. We can’t hurt our people. That’s bad.” And he feels the need to speak out, and that’s what gets him punished, and that’s what gets him banished. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>So it’s not what he thinks he should use once he’s banished trying to find the avatar. He builds this Hufflepuff model instead because maybe hard work and dedication and grinding himself into the ground will be what lets his father bring him back in. He doesn’t think being honest and standing his ground and being brave and good will get him home.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yes. And then he’s able to come back into his Gryffindor secondary once he feels like his feet are on firm ground again, and once he’s found his Hufflepuff again in a real way and feels solid with how he’s seeing the world and feels like he’s moving in the right direction.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah once his main drive, his main motivation and dream, is no longer to get back home, to get his father to let him come back home, but to build a better world, he’s finally able to lean into his Gryffindor and not rely on what will father not be mad about. So yeah, he starts with a Burned Huffle—no not a Burned Hufflepuff. He starts with a Hufflepuff that’s driving him in a really narrow way to get back home and to do whatever it takes to get back home.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Yeah, it’s not a Burned Hufflepuff, it’s just a small Hufflepuff.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, and he starts with a Burned Gryffindor secondary. He’s still using it some, it still comes easy to his hand, but he doesn’t think it’s the right method. He’s trying to go with these Hufflepuff secondary methods, and over the course of the story he learns to expand his Hufflepuff primary and make it less selfish in a way and to lean back into that Gryffindor secondary and know that being brave and strong and forthright and full of integrity to lead and protect the people around him is what he needs to do and wants to do and is good at doing. I think you even see it in The Storm episode, where he turns away from chasing the avatar to protect his crew. Yeah. It’s a good journey, and I love that he parallels with Katara. That’s just really satisfying to me.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> It is, yeah. I think it’s probably one of the reasons why I shipped them so hard when I was a kid watching this show.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Do you like narrative foils, Kat?</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> What? Me?</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Do narrative foils give you joy?</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat:</b>
  <span> Oh, they do. They really do.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>...</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>And that’s a wrap. If you’d like to learn more about our system, we have a quiz as well as explanatory and other sorting posts at WordPress and Tumblr at sortinghatchats. If you liked this episode, consider donating to the National Center for Transgender Equality, and tune in next month to listen to us sort She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Want an audio experience instead? Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or here at https://sortinghatchats.castos.com/episodes/sorting-avatar-the-last-airbender </p><p>Want to see the definitions we're working off of here? Check out sortinghatchats.wordpress.com or sortinghatchats.tumblr.com</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Sorting The Witcher</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Yennefer's burning, Jaskier's sense of constant romance, Ciri's superpowered secondary, and Geralt's bleeding heart-- today we sort Netflix's The Witcher.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Elisha C very kindly AGAIN transcribed this episode for us! We are eternally grateful, and hope you all enjoy.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Hi, I’m Emily.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>And I’m Kat.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>And we’re Sorting Hat Chats.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>And today we’re gonna sort The Witcher, specifically the first season of the tv show that came out recently.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yes, cause I’m coming into it as a big fan of the video games, specifically Witcher 3.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>And I watched our friends play Witcher 3, and that got me really into the books. I read them a while ago, so I only mostly remember them, but we’re going to have some loose thematic spoilers from the books.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, so we’ll be pulling some context from that to help with our sorting, but we’re gonna try as best we can to just look at the interpretation of the characters that shows up in the television show. Cause some of these characters will have different sortings across different adaptions.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Which is a very interesting thing to talk about, but not something we’re gonna talk about in this episode.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>And before we jump into the sorting: in this system we sort in two ways. Primary house, which is WHY a character does things, morals, motivations, and a secondary house, which is HOW a character does things. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>And with that here we go! Let’s see, so I think one of the more obvious sortings is Yennefer is a Slytherin primary, right?</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yes. Yes, she is.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>She’s very self-actualized. She gets her morality from her internal self and what she thinks is right, and that morality is very self-based, loyalty based, and people-she-loves based.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, she is willing to go against whatever her mission that she has decided she’s doing, she’s willing to go against that mission literally to spite someone who she thinks has betrayed her, and then she is willing to drop everything for someone she cares about.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yes, and what’s interesting is she starts the story caring about very few people, which is one of the big hallmarks of the Slytherin primary. You go, okay, we can tell they're a Slytherin because they’ve got this one person, and if anyone touches that person, they just murder everyone. And Yennefer doesn’t have that at the start, so she’s not actually a very easily Slytherin sort at the beginning, even though she fits a lot of the Slytherin stereotypes of selfish and kind of conniving, which aren’t what we base our sortings off of generally. I feel like most people would sort Yennefer Slytherin.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yes, but maybe for a different reason than we are.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, which is fun.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, cause that conniving bit usually is the Slytherin secondary, but I don’t actually think she’s a Slytherin secondary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>No. No, I think she has model, right? Cause she does the conniving, but it’s something that she learns and something that she applies, and it’s something that when shit really hits the fan, she just drops.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, and also when things get interesting enough, she’ll drop it. I loved that scene where Geralt comes in to the castle where she’s staying as a “prisoner,” and she just has this whole magical orgy going on, and it’s very Slytherin secondary. It’s very seductive. It’s very “Come in here I will influence you,” but Geralt comes in and he’s just like “Nah, this is weird. I’m not about this,” and she drops it because it’s not—he’s not playing, and then it’s not fun for her. </span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, it’s a face she puts on because it’s one that was really really encouraged by Tissaia, her main teacher, who said, “Okay, here are the things you need to be able to do in order to survive and to thrive.” And so Yennefer learns it cause she wants to win, but it’s not actually a tool that falls easiest to her hand, which is what makes it a model. So yeah, Slytherin secondary model. What do you think her actual secondary is? What’s her actual toolset?</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>I don’t think it’s Gryffindor, she doesn’t—well, actually it might be. She kind of charges a little bit.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, and she’s very—she’s blunt in her way, even though she learns ways to cover that up, and she’s a character who one of her greater powers is people meet her, they get to know her just a little bit, and then they want to follow her. They bring it up in the same episode you brought up. These men who are in love with her, and maybe it’s just cause I’m giving the show the benefit of the doubt cause I like it, but I didn’t get the feeling that that was something that was supposed to be all about sex appeal. That was something that was supposed to be about both power and vulnerability. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yennefer’s really engaging, and she’s really captivating, and she—you want her to win. Even though in some ways she’s very awful. I thought it was really interesting in how the show let her have almost a villainous arc before she got her eventual redemptive arc cause the orgy scene is really interesting, but it’s also in many ways very evil and very heartless.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Absolutely! Yes, she’s using magic to force people to have sex. That’s bad.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>You know, it was a magical roofie scene, which I would have liked if the show spent a little bit more time talking about </span>
  <em>
    <span>that</span>
  </em>
  <span>, but she has a bunch of markers like that that put her on the evil side, like with Stregobor in the first episode. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>One of the first things that sold me on the tv show adaption was they were using … Stregobor had all the naked illusions in his tower, which is, y’know, kinda gross in its implication, in its power dynamic, in the things you choose to do, and the show was using it to frame Stregobor as a villain, which is not what you normally get in high fantasy. Normally, there’s naked ladies for the audience, and here the naked ladies were to make the audience uncomfortable, to mark someone as villain, which you can see in how Geralt responds to it.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>I wonder how intentional it was—I imagine intentional—that this show gives us that Stregobor scene with all the naked people and then gives us the Yennefer scene with all of the naked people.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yes, exactly. That’s one of the reasons why I think they meant Yennefer to be a villain at that point. That’s her lowest point in a lot of ways. It’s both the point where she has the least power and the least freedom, and it’s also the point where she has the least humanity. She’s acting like Stregobor.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, she’s being cruel</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yes, and so even though I wanted a little bit more from the show in that episode to really call out what that scene was, I think because of the framing of the rest of the show, I have more belief and faith that they were doing that on purpose.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, I got the impression they knew it was bad then even if they didn’t call it out within the narrative.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, which again it’s good to call things out within your narrative, but they’ve done it other places which made it more believable. With Yennefer’s fall and then her rise in the second half of the season, both morally and I think also in terms of her faith in herself and her abilities, she drops the Slytherin secondary model that she was told she had to become if she wanted to be powerful, and I think she probably, I suspect, ends up leaning into whatever her secondary actually is.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, I think it might be Gryffindor, but I could also see Ravenclaw. I think the only one I can’t see is Hufflepuff secondary. I don’t think she’s Hufflepuff secondary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, I don’t think she’s Hufflepuff secondary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>But I could see Ravenclaw because, like we were saying with the Slytherin secondary model, she’s building her skillset, and when we see her in flashbacks with Tissaia, she’s demanding answers to questions. She’s working really hard to build this skillset. She’s very frustrated by her inability to learn the skills that she cares about, and while that of course could happen to anyone, it makes me, I dunno, as a Ravenclaw secondary, I really jammed with her in those moments.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, and I think that makes a lot of sense because that’s the place where she is expecting to excel. That’s the tool that falls easily to her hand, but it’s not working. I think that could almost apply to either Ravenclaw or Gryffindor there. It could be she’s trying to get a skill, and she can’t get it, and learning things is how she best acts, or the Gryffindor secondary might be somewhat tied up into her magic. A lot of her moments of power come from moments of strong emotion and strong honesty and strong reaction, but she has a hard time accessing them when she doesn’t care really strongly. When it’s not a reaction.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>There’s that other scene too where she confronts Tissaia, and she’s like, “I see what you’re doing. You’re doing this and this and this, and it’s bad, and I see through you,” and I wish that gave us more data to differentiate, but I think that would work either with a Ravenclaw secondary or with a Gryffindor secondary again because I think with the Gryffindor secondary, there she’s saying, “This is the truth. I’m forcing you to look at the truth. I’m confronting you,” but from the Ravenclaw secondary, I think it’s a criticism. It’s a “Look, I see what you’re doing, and it’s not as elegant as you think it is. It’s not as strategic. It’s not as smart as you think it is.”</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, so thinking of kind of differentiating between Ravenclaw and Gryffindor-- in our system, for listeners who don’t know, we have sort of spectrums that each of the houses are on, and so Gryffindor and Ravenclaw secondaries, they’re both what we call </span>
  <em>
    <span>solid</span>
  </em>
  <span> secondaries. Hufflepuff and Slytherin secondaries are more </span>
  <em>
    <span>fluid</span>
  </em>
  <span>. They would become whatever they need to be to make a situation work, and that’s fine by them. Ravenclaw and Gryffindor don’t really do that, which I think is what you’re talking about in that scene. That’s them both being solid and just bouncing off of Tissaia’s Slytherin. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>So the things that differentiate Ravenclaw and Gryffindor... Ravenclaw is a </span>
  <em>
    <span>foundational</span>
  </em>
  <span> house versus Gryffindor is an </span>
  <em>
    <span>improvisational</span>
  </em>
  <span> house, and then Ravenclaw is also a </span>
  <em>
    <span>situational</span>
  </em>
  <span> house. It does best in situations where they already have the skillset. It needs to be something they know otherwise they’re gonna have to scramble a little bit whereas Gryffindors are more likely to do well in spaces where they have </span>
  <em>
    <span>influence</span>
  </em>
  <span>, which is a little different.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>I think the place where we see her without a skillset, where she’s out of her element  is in the flashbacks where she’s learning to be a sorcerer with Tissaia, and she’s not popular with the other girls.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>No, she is not.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>She’s very frustrated and angry, and I think she charms Tissaia to some extent, but I think her lack of skillset in that area ends up really—I think that’s the worst we see her at as far as her feeling like she’s in control of her own life, and it’s only after she gains this magical skillset that she gains confidence.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, and I think what might be interesting to look at is why she charms Tissaia. Right? Because Tissaia brings up that Yennefer has emotion. Yennefer has passion. She has chaos inside of her, and it’s that chaos that gives her power, so whether or not Yennefer is a Gryffindor secondary, I think </span>
  <em>
    <span>Tissaia</span>
  </em>
  <span> thinks she’s a Gryffindor secondary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Oh! Yes.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Which might not mean she is, but I think that’s what Tissaia is seeing. She’s looking at her and being like, “You are powerful because you are reactive. You are powerful because you are intuitive and responsive and honest in the things that are in you,” which Tissaia then follows up with “Therefore, shove it all down and use it,” which is where Yennefer gets her Slytherin secondary model from. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>But that leans more towards Gryffindor for me, and I think the other moment that’s very useful to look at is the final battle, which I think is when Yennefer really comes into her own. It’s the culmination of her villainy/redemption arc, but I think it’s probably also the culmination of this arc that began with her in the pigsty, that took her to the sorcerers' training facility where she’s told she has to shove everything down, and she’s told she has to be this Slytherin secondary thing, and I think she finally sloughs that off and finds her own power there. So what power does she find in the final battle? Gryffindor or Ravenclaw? It’s definitely explosive.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>It’s definitely explosive, and explosive generally makes me think Gryffindor, but it’s not like Ravenclaw secondaries can’t be explosive. I mean, the thing that I was kind of thinking about was if she is a Gryffindor secondary, she might have been more interested in leading the school? Like because I think that’s something I think Tissaia was looking to her to do, right? She was like, “Hey you need to come and take over the school,” and if she had a Gryffindor secondary that would make her more of a leader character?</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Well it gives you a leader’s ability, but I don’t think Gryffindor secondaries necessarily are more likely to want to lead</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>No, that’s true</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>But I do think if Yennefer decided to lead that school, she would’ve led it good I think</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>I think so</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>I think that’s more of a nod to her primary, right? Her motivations.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, she didn’t want to lead the school.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>She’s a Slytherin. Yeah, she likes herself, she likes the idea of having a baby, she sorta likes Geralt, but it’s complicated, and that’s kinda where’s she’s at, and I think that shows up in the final battle too. I think one of the things that’s the culmination of her arc and also part of that redemption is her coming out of being this really burned Slytherin primary and accepting that she does care about the school, about Tissaia, about her sisters, and fighting to keep them alive and failing roughly and sort of winning. But like, it’s a bad victory. Everyone’s having a terrible time. But I think that definitely—Slytherin primary all the way because her arc is deciding that she cares about her family. But I think I’m leaning Gryffindor Secondary, which is surprising to me.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, I’m also leaning Gryffindor, but we’ll see how it develops.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, I think she could have more.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>It could still go either way, but I think we have more evidence toward her having a Gryffindor secondary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>I think as she gets happier and healthier and more settled in her world and her being in season two, hopefully? We could see her—</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Ehh</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Okay, everything will be terrible? Alright, alright. I think we may see more of her, and if she finds a strength there that she just hasn’t been able to get because of how everyone has been treating and thinking of her all this time, and therefore how she’s been treating herself, I could definitely see her growing back into a healthy Ravenclaw.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, but honestly my money’s on Gryffindor secondary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, that’s neat.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>That is.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah if she’s a Gryffindor secondary, she’s got a Slytherin secondary model for sure, and possibly a bit of a Ravenclaw one just to collect stuff.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, that’s very handy.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, they are handy. Okay, so that’s Yennefer. Slytherin primary, kinda burned, Gryffindor secondary, and then super heavy Slytherin secondary model that she got given to squash the rest of herself.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yes. The thing I’m very excited for, in this next season, is watching her interact with Ciri because I think they’re gonna play off of each other in really interesting ways because I feel strongly about this one that Ciri is a Slytherin secondary. It is her magical power.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>She just reacts to stuff, and she does whatever, and she doesn’t feel like she has to be honest, and she doesn’t feel like she has to be hardworking, and she doesn’t collect skills. She just reacts, and she survives, and she does not feel bad about it</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>No, I think she’s just Slytherin primary, Slytherin secondary. I’m not as sold on the primary, but that—</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Oh, you think Slytherin primary for her?</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>I could see Gryffindor primary also? It just—it feels internal to me.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>I—see, I think she’s a Ravenclaw.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Oh!</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Because she’s so good at taking outside information and putting it into her moral system and then just being along that line.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Oh, that’s interesting.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Like the friend, the elf kid. I don’t know his name. He’s like, “Hey, by the way, your grandma who you care about and you love strongly, she’s kind of evil. Just super evil. Just really evil to this entire species. That kind of sucks.” And Ciri’s like, “Oh! Okay, that seems true. I trust your assessment. Well, that’s bad, and you’re right. Neat-o.”</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>That’s fair.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Y’know, she’s 14. It takes a little processing, but she just like incorporates that into her moral system. She’s good at taking external input.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Mhm. It’ll be interesting to see how she incorporates Geralt’s teaching her the witcher system.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yes, I’m very curious because the Ciri that I’m most familiar with is grown up Ciri from the video games, and I’m really curious to see 1) if this Ciri will grow up to be like that Ciri and 2) how she will grow up. But I think she’s an external primary. She gets her moral information from the outside, so I’m thinking either Ravenclaw or Hufflepuff.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>I don’t think she’s a Hufflepuff primary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily</b>
  <span>: Right? She’s just—there’s just not a—so I think it’s Ravenclaw</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>I think you’re right. It feels so much more considered and almost—sterile isn’t the right word?</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily</b>
  <span>: But it’s not the wrong word either to be fair</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah. No, I think you’ve sold me I think, yeah. I think Ravenclaw primary, Slytherin secondary, and I’m not even sure if she even has models at this point.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>No, no. I think she’ll probably get some? One, it’s a really common thing for Ravenclaws, but especially she’s gonna be a young Ravenclaw with some really charismatic mentors, so I suspect she’s gonna get some stuff from Yennefer, get some stuff from Geralt, and even get some stuff from Jaskier.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>That would be nice.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>So yeah, and speaking of Jaskier, Hufflepuff primary? Slytherin primary? Something loyalist?</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>So, we’ll see where it goes, but I definitely agree loyalist. I think Slytherin, and that’s also informed from some stuff I know from the books, but I do think we see some Slytherin bits even in the tv show when Geralt insults him and is just like “You’re not my friend. I don’t like you.” It could be Jaskier reacting as a Hufflepuff being like, “That’s very rude of you,” but it feels more Slytherin to me. It feels more like, “That’s a betrayal. You’re going to regret that. You don’t even understand how important I am to you” because I think Jaskier is very much not burned in his primary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Oh yes. Whatever he is, he’s not burned. He’s fine. Also, when he first meets Geralt, he bonds to him sort of super fast? At least like practically? I don’t think Geralt is very important to Jaskier until later on in their relationship, but when he first meets Geralt, he’s just like, “Yes! You! I’m going with you.” And the reason isn’t because Geralt is a person or Geralt is in need or Jaskier feels bad for him. He’s like, “You’re interesting. I like this. This is gonna be useful to me.” And so he goes, and then the caring happens, as it does to those poor Slytherin primaries, and by the end of it, Jaskier has that really strong Slytherin link that means Geralt is immensely important to his personal world and happiness and reality.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>And it’s also true that, I’ll keep it vague for listeners who haven’t read the books, but Geralt at some certain points in the books gets a bit of a posse together, and it definitely becomes a community, and Jaskier does not care about this community the way he cares about Geralt.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Ah, it’s just Geralt.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah. They’re nice too, but it’s Geralt.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, and I think for secondary, it’s the same set of houses that are questions. Slytherin secondary and Hufflepuff secondary. Slytherin being the adaptive, the creative, the go with the flow and Hufflepuff being the hardworking, dedicated, productive, lynchpin. On the surface, he seems a lot like a Slytherin secondary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, he’s playful.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Right? He’s very playful. Like that’s how I first sorted him when I was just watching the show. I was like, “Oh! Slytherin secondary, yeah whatever. Sing, bard man.” But I think he’s a Hufflepuff. There’s an interview with the actor, who’s great, and he talks about how Jaskier was sort of—so he’ll talk about him like he’s a womanizer, and the actor—</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>That’s … wrong</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah! The actor was like, “No.”</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>They’re wrong, who’s saying that?</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>“That’s not the thing that’s happening. He’s just literally falling in love with these people he sees.” Y’know, he means it when he’s playing and he’s flirting.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Oh, absolutely.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>He means it all the way down, and so that’s that place we were talking about earlier where Hufflepuff and Slytherin secondary share a similarity where they’re both really flexible. They both will appear—They both will be whatever they need to be in whatever room they’re in, but for Slytherins, it’s a thing they’re </span>
  <em>
    <span>doing</span>
  </em>
  <span>, and for Hufflepuffs, it’s a thing they’re </span>
  <em>
    <span>being</span>
  </em>
  <span>. If you mean it all the way down and to </span>
  <em>
    <span>not</span>
  </em>
  <span> mean it all the way down means you won’t be very good at it, you're probably a Hufflepuff secondary, not a Slytherin.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, I definitely agree. I think he’s a Hufflepuff secondary. He, with his magic bard abilities, “Toss a Coin to Your Witcher,” he’s definitely creating community where he goes. He’s doing a lot of the hardworking things that we also see with the Hufflepuff secondaries where he’s writing a bunch of songs, and a lot of them are not good, but he keeps doing it, and then one of them is very good or at least very catchy, and in the books, he does a lot of that too. He writes a lot of poetry in the books. Some of the narration is even from his perspective. He has a very flowery narration style unsurprisingly, but it’s just, he’s constantly writing. He’s constantly—he reminds me of you in that way, actually.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Aw, why thanks. But yeah, he does the Hufflepuff secondary thing where you just do the thing and do the thing and do the thing until it works. And you only do that with the stuff you care about. If you don’t care, you can be the flakiest thing in the whole universe.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Oh, and he is.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, exactly.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>And he is.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>And that ends up with a lot of Hufflepuff secondaries being missorted because they’re flaky in some aspects of their life, but they’re never flaky in the things they care about, and I think it also speaks to a thing you were mentioning earlier where Geralt breaks up with him on the mountain, and Jaskier is like, “What the fuck, bro. You don’t even understand how important I am to your life,” and that’s also a Hufflepuff secondary thing. They can be really overlooked, but they tend to be sort of the flagstone for a stable system. If you take the Hufflepuff secondary out, things have a tendency to fall apart, and if people aren’t paying attention or don’t understand that type of power, they’ll miss that, and then their house falls down, and it’s bad. And then Geralt’s house fell down, and it was bad.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yes, it was.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>I was very sad not to have any Jaskier in the final episode.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, that was rude.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>So yes, Slytherin/Hufflepuff for him, which is a nice contrast to Yennefer’s also Slytherin primary. Geralt may collect them. Or they collect Geralt, I guess, actually.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>I think they—yes, they definitely collect. Well, Geralt I think collects Ciri, but Jaskier definitely collects Geralt.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yep. And speaking of Geralt, he’s hard to sort. His primary is very caked in stuff, like dirt and blood.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Whatever it is, it’s burned.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Right? How to start with Geralt. He helps a lot of people in a very gruff way, but he does. He’s more likely than the rest of the narrative to see humanity and worth in places other people have written off, which that can definitely be a Gryffindor thing. It can be a Hufflepuff thing. A Hufflepuff primary is gonna treat everyone like they’re a person. It can be a Ravenclaw primary thing, where you’re doing it based off of external rules and observations and trying not to apply bias that isn’t correct. I don’t think he’s a Slytherin primary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>No, I don’t think he is either, and I think we see that in his reaction to Jaskier and in the fact that he’s not really going around looking for people to bond to. Ciri is an accident.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Ciri is an accident. Yennefer is an accident.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>And then he leaves, and he doesn’t leave in the burned Slytherin kind of way where it’s very angsty, and he shuts down, and it’s either not safe for him to have connections or it’s not safe for them to be connected to him. It doesn’t have that burned Slytherin angst to it.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>No, and when he comes back for Ciri, it feels a lot more like an obligation or a debt. It’s something he’s supposed to do because it’s the right thing. It’s not because she’s his, the way Yennefer feels about the child she wants. That’s not how Geralt feels about Ciri. She’s his problem, and it’s important that she’s his problem, and he’s gonna do something about it, but it’s different than how a Slytherin primary would do it.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, and I don’t think he’s a Ravenclaw primary because we see him act inconsistently with what he says are his beliefs with the Witcher Code. We see him present this very black and white view of morality: there are monsters, there are witchers, witchers kill monsters for money, but that’s not how he actually interacts with them.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>No, and he also—he judges situations sort of on a circumstantial basis. When he’s in the moment, he looks at the stuff that is there and goes, “Okay, I’m gonna do this,” and you don’t see him applying those external rules, even though he talks about them a lot. Both the Witcher Code and also the Law of Destiny, the Law of Surprise. Those sorts of things. It’s “this is how the world works,” and then he doesn’t always go with that, and it’s not because he decides it’s wrong, which is another Ravenclaw primary you could have. He thinks that’s right. That’s how the world works. And then he doesn’t do it. He does something else.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>And it doesn’t seem to bother him, and I think an inconsistency like that would bother a Ravenclaw primary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>So that means we’re going with either Gryffindor primary or Hufflepuff primary, and I think because of the emphasis on humanity and the emphasis on people and monsters being human and some people being monsters, that’s a really Hufflepuff way to interact with a story.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>It is.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>He doesn’t talk about right and wrong. He looks around for who’s hurting and who’s vulnerable and who needs his help</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, and he also dehumanizes some people because that is part of the theme, right? Is some humans are monsters, and that’s a very Hufflepuff dehumanizing kind of thing that they’re like, “Every person matters, but not every human is a person, and also some monsters are people.”</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, the fact that in order to make his moral system work for himself, he has to do it in terms of </span>
  <em>
    <span>who is people.</span>
  </em>
  <span> That’s a very Hufflepuff question, and to destroy the people he needs to destroy and to fight people he needs to fight, he needs to declare them </span>
  <em>
    <span>not people</span>
  </em>
  <span> as opposed to just declaring them evil. Alright, I like this. Hufflepuff primary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Burned? Burned Hufflepuff.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yes, and he—I think his arc is going to be unburning. I don’t think he’ll ever be entirely unburned, but I think he’ll be less burned.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Actually, different proposition. I bet his arc is going to be growing a Slytherin primary model. I think his Hufflepuff will stay burned, but he’ll decide a good way to live morally is to love a few people well. Cause the book is really Slytherin.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Also, Yennefer. I think he’ll just build, he’ll grow a Slytherin primary model for Yennefer.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yennefer and Ciri. And hopefully Jaskier. The boy needs some love</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Oh yeah, I think also for Jaskier.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>But yeah, I think that’s gonna be the healing and victory arc the book is gonna give him, is learning how to be a Slytherin, even though he’ll still be a burned Hufflepuff, and there’ll be a part him that’s sad he can’t save the world. The book thinks he should be a Slytherin to be happy.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yes, but I’m going to push back a little bit. I don’t think these are mutually exclusive.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>True.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Because, and this is thematic spoilers, but I won’t give spoilers, but in the books there is this whole arc that he goes through of, “You’re a magical creature, but you’re also kind of a person,” and we see that even a little bit in the first season with Renfri. And she’s also human, just a mutant, so it’s a little bit more ambiguous and not as much of a stretch for him, but I do think they’re still kind of teasing at that issue.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, where he can also get some healing there. Yeah, that’s gonna be fun to watch. I’m really curious where they’re gonna take it</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, and I’m just—I love his actor so much. I love that his actor knows Geralt from the books and is appropriately dorky.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yes, it’s very important for Geralt to be dorky. If he’s cool, you’re not doing it right.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>I was so scared that he was gonna be this really cool badass because he’s not. He’s not good at socializing.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>No.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>He’s really really not, and it’s great.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Speaking of skills, what do we think for secondary?</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Oh, whatever it is, it’s burned.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>This poor lad covered in blood and death. I think reactive. I think it’s an improvisational secondary. I don’t think he’s Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw. I don’t think he’s grounded. I don’t think he succeeds based on the prep he has done or the work he has done or the investments he has made.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>I agree.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>He’s unmoored.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>And yeah, I could see—I think this brings up a kind of fun dichotomy that we’ve talked about on the blogs some, which is the Gryffindor secondary being the unstoppable force and the Slytherin secondary being the immovable object, especially the Slytherin secondary neutral state. I’m leaning a little bit more toward Gryffindor because he’s got a charge-y feel to him.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, after a while he just sighs and then kills everybody.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, but I could see that being a resigned kind of Slytherin secondary who likes neutral state-ing, but for that to work he would have to basically live in his neutral state because we’ve seen him try to kind of small talk, and he’s real bad at it.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Which is fair, and that is definitely a thing some characters do. We’ve talked about Avatar earlier, but there’s another good example there which is Toph who, against all odds, is a Slytherin secondary. She’s just constantly in the “But I give no fucks” neutral state. So Geralt could be hanging out there.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>We don’t see him really have the Slytherin secondary skillset because even Toph turns that on in Ba Sing Se.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>That’s one of the reasons we could identify her is what she does with that, whereas Geralt is pretty much always a trash fire. </span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yes. A sexy, sexy trash fire.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>And he does inspire reluctantly, which is a Gryffindor secondary thing.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>That’s true.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>A lot of this is Jaskier’s hard work he’s been putting in to craft his narrative, but I think if Jaskier had been crafting a narrative about someone other than Geralt, it might not have worked, which I think does push me more towards a Gryffindor secondary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, and I think resigned is an excellent kind of word to use, like the whole idea of like he sighs, and then he kills everyone. I think he’s a very tired Gryffindor secondary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>He’s so tired, yeah. I think he’s burned somewhat because—so to be a burned secondary is to not think your skillset is going to get you what you want. He’s going to think, “These are like the ways I like to act. These are the methods I use. I think they are both the effective ones and the right ones, but they’re not working for some reason.” And I think for Geralt, it’s less about the effectiveness. He doesn’t feel ineffective. That’s not the thing that’s making him sad. He’s feeling like they’re not the right—these aren’t the methods that work in the world. He would like to be honest. He would like to be forthright. He would like to have genuine connection and get to be his genuine self.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yes. Yes, yes yes. Especially because he has those—I think that’s why he’s so bad at small talk, and that’s why he hates even dressing up in different clothes.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yes, he doesn’t want to be anyone other than what he is. But I think he also to a degree feels like what he is is kind of gross, and I think that’s part of what’s complicating it because he didn’t ask to be a witcher. He didn’t ask to be this covered in blood, but he is, so he’s gonna do it because it’s the honest thing.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, and yeah that is very Hufflepuff also of the “I didn’t ask for this, but this is my duty in life. I’m very tired.”</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>So tired. So yeah, Hufflepuff/Gryffindor which of course is also—our nickname for a Hufflepuff primary Gryffindor secondary—</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Is the protagonist sorting!</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Is the protagonist sorting. It’s just great. You have a Hufflepuff primary, so if someone is hurting in front of them, they care inherently, and then you have a Gryffindor secondary, which means if someone is hurting in front of them—</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>They’re gonna do stuff!</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Inherently, and it’s great. It’s the protagonist sorting. It makes plot happen.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>It does. Plot. What is plot?</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Very burned protagonist sorting, but that’s what you get with grimdark fantasy, though I do love that The Witcher’s grimdarkness still believes in hope and people. That’s what makes it a livable show.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, and the show draws important moral lines, which not all of grimdark fantasy does, cough cough Game of Thrones.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Sometimes grimdark fantasy is just trying to say, “And therefore, nothing matters.”</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>And this is not a nihilist show, which is nice. It’s refreshing.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yes, I like it. Alright, so I think that’s our main crew. We got Hufflepuff primary, Gryffindor secondary Geralt.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Mhm. A little bit burned, both of them.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Oh yeah. Poor kid who cares and punches things. We’ve got Ravenclaw primary Ciri with her super-powered Slytherin secondary.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>So powerful, wow.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>We’ve got Yennefer, Slytherin primary. Secondary is still a little squishy, but our money’s on Gryffindor weirdly. I didn’t expect it, but I like it.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>That just made me think, because Geralt and Yennefer both being Gryffindor secondaries, that’s absolutely how they are bonding.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Oh shit, yeah. Yeah that’s great.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, I just—I didn’t even realize that before, but yeah. They both drop pretenses, and then they just honest talk at each other, and then they’re like, “This is really hot let’s have sex.”</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, he literally walks bluntly through her Slytherin secondary model and goes, “I brought you juice,” and she’s like, “Oh damn.”</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>“Hot damn, let’s do this.”</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Okay, okay. Yeah yeah, no that gives more credence there, and he’s got his big ‘ol Ravenclaw primary “I’m a witcher” model that he’s hiding behind from his upbringing, and she’s got her big ‘ol Slytherin secondary model “This is how I must act to be powerful in the world, my mommy told me so” that’s in front of her, and they both drop them for each other, or will I hope. That’s great</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>No spoilers, but I think that’s where it’s headed</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Well, it’s—they both kind of started to do that. Geralt started specifically prioritizing her, dropping the Ravenclaw sort of sterile rules he’s built, and then she drops the games. They both went back up because everyone’s got damage, but we started to see that progress. And then we got Jaskier, Slytherin primary, completely unburned, doing fine, thank you. Hufflepuff secondary, does the work, very effective, and no one notices. It’s a fun place to be.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah. The last thing I want to touch on is something that we haven’t seen too much of in the show yet? But we’ve seen a bit of it which is a tendency for people to think Slytherpuffs are a lot happier than they are.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Oh! Interesting.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Because they seem so dang happy, but it’s kind of an ongoing thing in the book, and in the video game maybe less so? You’ll have to remind me.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>We don’t get a ton of Dandelion in the video game.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Okay, so in the books, he’s a cynic. He’s a straight cynic, and Geralt will tease him for being such a happy cynic sometimes, but I think that’s something that can get hidden in the Slytherpuff. The Slytherpuff can sometimes seem a little bit simpler than they are emotionally because they do have that Slytherin kind of internal morality</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, where it seems like a lot of things don’t affect them because they’re a Slytherin primary, and so there’s a lot of moral quandaries that are less relevant for them</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, and so most of the time, Jaskier is just like, “La-di-dah-di-dah. I’m doing my thing, everything is grand,” but when Geralt breaks up with him, his face just drops, and we just see this very serious, very mature side of him that we didn’t really see until that happened. </span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Cause it’s one of the few things that matters cause he’s a very simple Slytherin. You’ll get Slytherin primaries who have other moralities and other complicating factors they’ve decided to care about.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>And I don’t think he does.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, Jaskier just never had that. He cares about him, he cares about Geralt, he doesn’t like Yennefer, and that’s it. That’s the whole thing. But when you punch him there, he’s super vulnerable. He has no armor because he has such a small place of vulnerability. It’s so often irrelevant, but when that becomes relevant, it hurts cause he has no protection.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Aw, I love him.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, he’s great. It’s a great show. It’s a great game. It’s a great book.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Very good. I did not except to come out of this having sorted Yennefer as a Gryffindor secondar</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Right? But I like it.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Me too!</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>And I really wanna see where that goes.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, and I’m gonna have to watch Geralt and Yennefer Gryffindor secondary with each other now because I bet I missed some nuances. I bet that’s gonna be delightful if I go back and rewatch some of those episodes.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yeah, my gut would be that there’s a sort of relief and a fellow feeling and an alrightness. Because Yennefer doesn’t think it’s okay to be that way.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>No, no she doesn’t.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Everything has told her that it is not. Except for that first archeologist boyfriend lad, but then that of course turned on its head, and then it told her that too. But he was the first one who was like, “Hey you. Good job feeling things and showing up.”</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>And she was like, “That seems wrong. I don’t trust it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Mhm. And then he was like, “Well, I’ve sort of been betraying you to evil people. It’s fine.” So she’s got good evidence.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Oh! I think Yennefer’s secondary was burned at the beginning.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Yes, I don’t think we’ve seen her without a burned secondary until maybe the final battle.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Yeah, that’s what was hard. That’s why she was so hard to sort for secondary because I knew she was kinda burned there, but I don’t think I realized how burned her secondary was.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>And she also unburns her Slytherin primary in the final battle. It’s the opposite of the—Tissaia asked her to burn her Slytherin and burn her Gryffindor. Tissaia, you’re such a healthy mom.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Ugh, Tissaia.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>But with the slugs and shoving her sisters.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Kat: </b>
  <span>Oh, that was so awful.</span>
</p><p>
  <b>Emily: </b>
  <span>Who she could’ve cared about into the water, that was her asking her to burn her Slytherin and “Control your chaos” is burn your Gryffindor, and she unburns both in order to be powerful in the last battle. She has to care like a Slytherin, and she has to act like a Gryffindor.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>...</span>
</p><p>
  <span>That was Sorting Hat Chats sorts The Witcher. If you want to know more about what we’re talking about or see our other sortings, if you check us out at sortinghatchats.wordpress.com. Next time we’ll be sorting The Good Place. Thanks for listening.</span>
</p>
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